And still another Chinese friend I remember especially, among all the ones I loved and still do love, although I have no means now of communication with them. For I dare not write to them nowadays, since a letter from an American might endanger their lives in the strange Communist China I do not know. And no letter ever comes from them any more, to tell me how the children grow and which is being married and which married ones are having grandchildren. One wintry morning, then, somewhere in those years of uneasy peace after the death of Sun Yat-sen, I heard a knock at my door. I opened it and saw a woman standing there, a ragged dusty figure whom I could not recognize. She came from the North, that I could see, for her half-bound feet and baggy trousers, her old-fashioned knee-length padded jacket and rusty disheveled hair could only belong to a northern peasant.
“Wise Mother,” she said, “do you not remember me?”
“No,” I said, “but please come in.”
She came in then and sat on the edge of a chair and told me who she was. In the North I had had for a while a rascal of a young fellow for a gardener. He knew nothing and worked as little, and we soon parted company. He was her husband, she now told me, but he had run away and left her when the famine came down. It was a famine year; I knew, and we were expecting refugees before many months, but this woman had come early. And she was pregnant, that I could now see.
“Have you no children?” I asked.
She patted her belly. “Only this one. The others all died of the ten-day-madness — five of them.”
This ten-day-madness was simply the convulsions of tetanus, a disease from which many Chinese babies died within the first fortnight of their lives. It was the result of infection at birth, and yet was easily prevented. I had spent a good deal of effort in teaching young Chinese women how to boil the scissors and the bits of cloth or cotton which they used for the children when born. In the North, however, scissors were not used. Instead a child’s cord was cut with a strip of reed or leaf, peeled from the inside. By some sort of experience the women had learned not to use metal and the reed could be clean or not, depending upon its handling.
“I came to you,” the woman said, adding with touching and I must say annoying naïveté, “I have no one else.”
I cannot pretend that I was at all happy about this naïveté or that I was in the least flattered by her confidence. Where could I put a pregnant peasant woman in my already too complex household? She could not live outside the compound, for a woman alone and without relatives would only be molested by any idle man in the neighborhood, and we had plenty of such in these times of war lords and unrest and wandering soldiers. The old peaceful security of my own childhood was entirely gone and even my children could not wander about the countryside as I had once done.
My guest must have seen what was going on in my mind, for she said humbly, “There is a little house behind your garden, Wise Mother. I saw it when I came in the gate. I could live there until the child is born, not troubling you or anyone except for a handful of rice, and then when I am able I will find work.”
The little house was a hen house and in no way fit for a human being and I told her so. Besides, there was another room, used for storage but quite good, and it could be prepared for her. “But you had better have your child in the hospital,” I concluded. “Then you will have good care.”
Mrs. Lu — there is no reason why I should not tell her true name, for she is dead now, good soul, and there are as many Lus in China as there are Smiths in America — was a sweetly stubborn woman, as I was to discover. She wanted the chicken house, where she could be alone, and she would not, under any persuasion, go to a foreign hospital. She had had so many children, she insisted, that she knew exactly what to do and she wanted no one with her when the baby was born. I yielded at last, for she would not yield, and the hen house was cleaned and white-washed, the two windows scrubbed free of dust and cobwebs and the floor re-laid with fresh clean brick. I put a bed and a table and a chair or two in the little room and curtained the windows so that men would not look in at night and gave her a strong padlock for the door. With a little money I gave her she bought herself a pottery charcoal brazier, to be used for both heat and cooking, an earthen teapot and two bowls and a pair of chopsticks, and a small store of food. Thereafter Mrs. Lu was part of the compound and she remained almost unseen while she waited for the child. Meanwhile, troubled that she would not go to the hospital or even have our good amah with her, I made up a small sterile kit for her, containing bandages, scissors, and a bottle of iodine.
One crisp December morning the amah came with good news. Mrs. Lu had come out of her little house long enough to tell her that the baby had arrived during the night. I ordered the usual nourishing food and liquids for the mother, first a bowl of hot water strongly mixed with red sugar, and followed in an hour or so by chicken soup and noodles. This was accepted northern practice, the red sugar supposedly replenishing the blood, and the chicken and noodles insuring a good supply of milk. Then I went to visit mother and baby. It was a pretty sight. The little room was clean and warm, for Mrs. Lu had made everything tidy after the event, and she was lying in bed, her large flat face rapturous, and, wrapped in the clean baby blankets I had given her was a small very fat boy. She had put on him the usual Chinese arrangements for diapers and then he was encased in the blankets. All seemed in order and I gave her a birth gift for congratulations of two silver dollars wrapped in red paper. She was so grateful that she made me uncomfortable and I left as soon as I could.
The next day while I was at breakfast the amah came in to tell me that the baby was dying. I could not believe it. “Didn’t she use the boiled scissors to cut his cord?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, Wise Mother,” the amah said. “But his belly is burned.”
What mystery was this? I went out at once to the little house and found the baby very ill indeed. Mrs. Lu unwrapped the swaddling garments and there upon his tiny belly I saw burns around his navel. They were iodine burns.
“But I told you not to pour the iodine on the baby,” I exclaimed.
“Ah, so you said, Wise Mother,” Mrs. Lu moaned. “But I thought, if the medicine is good, why not use it all?”
I said I would take the baby at once to the hospital but this Mrs. Lu would not hear of, nor would she have the foreign doctor touch the child, not for a moment. But she let me take him to my own house and there I did the best I could for him. After a few days in my bedroom his robust peasant ancestry came to his aid, he decided to live, and I could return him to his mother. Before he was a month old his father, the runaway husband, appeared at the gate and the family was united again. I found a job for him on the university farms and Mrs. Lu rented a small earthen house, two little rooms, just over the compound wall.
Once again the baby came near death before he was a year old. It was after the summer, and Mrs. Lu walked in with him one day weeping and declaring that the child was doomed to die for some past sin in another incarnation. She turned him over to display his naked bottom and there I saw broken blisters and raw flesh.
“How is it he is burned again?” I inquired, astounded.
“He is not burned, Wise Mother,” Mrs. Lu said. “I said to myself that now he is so big I should not use the water cloths you gave me but lay him on a bed of sand as we do in the north country, so that when he wets, there is no washing. But here there is no sand as we have in the North and so I laid him on ashes from the stove.”